The English Baroque Soloists has established itself among the world's leading period instrument orchestras. Founder and artistic director John Eliot Gardiner regularly joins his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in opera and choral performances. The EBS repertoire takes in music from the Classical period as well as the Baroque. Together, the groups launched the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000, performing all of Bach's sacred cantatas throughout Europe. The EBS has toured widely and has been heard on over 100 recordings. In 2020, the EBS and Monteverdi Choir, under Gardiner, issued a recording of Handel: Semele.

Although the English Baroque Soloists was officially established as a chamber ensemble of period instruments in 1978, the group actually gave its first concert at the 1977 Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, in a performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea. Founded by John Eliot Gardiner, the EBS drew many of its original members from another group Gardiner had founded (in 1968), the Monteverdi Orchestra. Shortly after its founding, Bach and Handel were largely the focus of the EBS. However, the group became closely associated with Mozart's music, mainly because of its numerous, generally highly acclaimed recordings of his works. In 1984, Gardiner and the EBS launched a series for the Archiv Produktion label devoted to Mozart's concertos for piano and orchestra with soloist Malcolm Bilson (using a fortepiano) and the first such cycle using period instruments. Two years later, with the concerto series ongoing, it launched another Mozart project, this one to cover the mature symphonies for Philips. In the summer of 1990, the EBS debuted at the Salzburg Festival, giving three concerts, all to critical acclaim.

With the 1990 release of Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491, and No. 27, K. 595, the piano concerto series was completed, but the EBS and Gardiner immediately set to work recording the seven mature operas of Mozart for Archiv Produktion. The first release in this cycle, Idomeneo, won Gramophone's Best Opera Award in 1991. In that same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and the Monteverdi Choir appeared in a live BBC television broadcast of Mozart's Requiem performed at the Palau de la Música Catalana. The last issue in the Gardiner/EBS Mozart operas series, Die Zauberflöte, was released in 1996, after which it turned to the music of Bach.

In the late 1990s, a new series of recordings began with the release in 2000 of Bach's Cantatas No. 6 "Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend" (BWV 6) and No. 66, "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen" (BWV 66). Along with the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner and the EBS performed the entire cycle of 198 Bach cantatas throughout various European churches in 2000 on its Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. The EBS was hardly focusing on only Mozart or Bach in the 1990s: its performance at Covent Garden in 1995 of Haydn's Die Schöpfung was enthusiastically received and led to a successful 1997 recording on Archiv Produktion. Also, in 1995, the EBS and the Monteverdi Choir performed the music for the film England, My England, a highly acclaimed movie directed by Tony Palmer about composer Henry Purcell. That same year, Gardiner, the EBS, and Monteverdi Choir issued a multi-disc set on the label Erato devoted to Purcell's music. 2005 saw the creation of the Soli Deo Gloria label by the combined Gardiner ensembles to issue recordings from the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Since then, the EBS has issued a number of recordings for the label, including Handel: Semele, with the Monteverdi Choir and conducted by Gardiner, in 2020. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner is a leading figure in the historical performance movement, having founded the Monteverdi Choir for performances of Baroque music and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, devoted to music of the 19th century. He is especially noted for performances and recordings of Bach's choral music, and his label, Soli Deo Gloria ("To the Glory of God Only"), takes its name from the small S.D.G. signature Bach affixed to many of his works.

Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943, in the village of Fontmell Magna in England's Dorset County. It is worth notice that for the first part of his musical education, he was largely self-taught: he sang in a village church choir and played the violin. At 15, he took up conducting, and while he was studying history, Arabic, and medieval Spanish at Cambridge, he also began conducting choirs there. He led choirs from Oxford and Cambridge on a Middle Eastern tour while still an undergraduate, and in 1964, he conducted a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, a work little known at the time. Out of this performance grew the Monteverdi Choir, his primary performing ensemble. Gardiner studied musicology and conducting with Thurston Dart and Nadia Boulanger in the mid-'60s, which was his only period of formal musical study. In 1968, he founded a Monteverdi Orchestra to go with the choir; in the '70s, the group began to use Baroque instruments and was renamed the English Baroque Soloists. With this group and the Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner has made recordings numbering in the hundreds. Mostly during the first part of his career, he also worked with conventional symphony orchestras. His U.S. debut came in 1979 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and in the '80s and early '90s, he was music director of the CBC Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Opera de Lyon Orchestra, and the North German Radio Orchestra (now the NDR Elbphilharmonie). In 1990, as understanding of the historical instruments used in the music of Beethoven and subsequent composers was just developing, he founded the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, leading it on tour in 1993 with a then recently rediscovered Messe solennelle of Berlioz.

One of Gardiner's most celebrated accomplishments was his Bach Cantata Pilgrimage of 2000, with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists. The group toured for 52 weeks, performing all of Bach's cantatas at their appropriate times in the liturgical year, often in churches with relevance in Bach's own career. The performances were recorded and issued in lavish packaging on Soli Deo Gloria, with essays by Gardiner delving into the meaning of each work. These essays led Gardiner to publish a book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013). Gardiner has also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and other labels. His Schumann symphony recordings with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique are credited with introducing a trend toward smaller forces in those works. Another major tour came in Spain in 2004, as Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir retraced the medieval Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route and sang medieval Spanish repertory. Gardiner has also appeared as a guest conductor with major symphony orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra. His recording career has not slackened in the least in his senior citizen years, as he has often released a half-dozen recordings per year or more. In 2019, he and the Monteverdi Choir released Love is come again, featuring music from the Springhead Easter Play, a mime event staged annually at Gardiner's family home and originally directed by his mother. He was not slowed much in 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic, for he already had material in the hopper, including a modern-instrument recording of a pair of Schumann symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. He returned in 2022 with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in a new recording for the Deutsche Grammophon label of Bach's St. John Passion, BWV 245. Gardiner's many awards include designation as Commander of the British Empire in 1990 and as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France in 2011. ~ James Manheim